So, it was clear that the pages of the books, traces of glue lingering, would not feed through. I briefly considered photocopying each page and then scanning it in, but the waste of paper, and the duplication of effort dissuaded me from that lunacy pretty quickly.

However…

I had found the page proofs of my manuscripts. Page proofs aren’t perfect, but are almost the finished pages. I planned to edit the books again, so why not scan in the page proofs. This would have worked brilliantly…if only page proof lines weren’t numbered. The OCR couldn’t handle the angsty confusion of lines beginning with numbers and spit out scanned images that our country’s best code crackers couldn’t read.

So what to do?

Enter the paper cutter gathering dust in my office. Cut the pages in half, cut the numbers off, and — the printer can handle ten pages at a time! Yay.

Enter my awful luck. The scanner started eating the pages. Boo.

Back to feeding in one pages at a time.

Sigh.

After a great deal of time and scanning — on to the hurdle of editing the scanned pages into a complete and readable document. Will recount that adventure tomorrow.